Harry & Sohn

For a kid from the posh suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio Paul Newman has a remarkable affinity for playing blue collar men. This is a guy who knows the value of hard work and it's his greatest disappointment in life is that he hasn't passed on that value to his children, Katherine Borowitz and Robby Benson.

It's Benson who Newman worries the most about. He wants to be a writer, but that just doesn't happen over night. One has to get out into the world and acquire a little life experience to learn what one wants to write about. The only one that didn't apply to was Emily Dickinson. Benson cites Hemingway as getting rejected 300 times before getting some money for his thoughts. But there certainly was a man who had himself a lot of life experience and earned a few dollars to pay his own way.

I could understand Newman very well since I came from a family of uncles just like Newman on my mother's side. I could understand Benson less so since all he wants is surf and sex. He tries working at some dead end jobs, his scenes with Morgan Freeman at a cardboard box factory and trying to repossess Ossie Davis's car are his best in the film.

In fact Newman's tragedy is that health issues cause him to stop working and he won't acknowledge them.

But it's Newman and Benson that's the heart of Harry&Son. Father and son Keach come to a kind of understanding toward the end. The film is not the best from either Newman or Benson, but nothing to be ashamed of here.

Harry & Son (1984)

** (out of 4)

Family drama centering on father Harry (Paul Newman), a blue collar construction worker who loses his job due to an unknown illness he's suffering from. Harry has trouble trying to connect to his growing son Howard (Robby Benson) who wants to make it as a writer. The son can't keep a "real" job, which rubs his father the wrong way since he actually wants to work but is unable to. You can tell this was a labor of love for Newman who not only plays the lead but he also directed, produced and co-wrote the screenplay. If you've seen some of Newman's earlier directorial films you'll know that he can create some very touching pictures and there are glimpses of that here but sadly the end result is that HARRY & SON is a complete misfire and without question the low point in Newman's directing career. The biggest problem is without question the screenplay, which is a real mess. I think this movie is supposed to be about a father and son relationship but you'd never know that because not for a second does Harry and Howard come off as some sort of connection. The relationship between the two never really comes off as a father-son thing and another major problem is that neither character really gets a chance to grow. I'd also say that the screenplay really doesn't give us much to go on because we never fully understand their motivations. We never really know why the father is so against his son. There's a subplot with an issue between Harry and his daughter that we never fully understand. There are a wide range of characters who pop up only to either disappear or you never fully get to know who they are. Another major problem with the film is that even though it runs 117-minutes, in the current form, that's way too long as scenes just seem to drag on or the obvious just happens. I'm not sure if this was originally much longer and perhaps some of the character development had to be cut out to get it down to its current length. The one saving grace here and what keeps the film from being a major dud are the performances, which for the most part are very strong. Newman has no trouble playing the troubled blue collar worker but one wishes the screenplay would have given him a stronger character to stick his teeth in. Joanne Woodward is very good in her small supporting role as a love interest. We get other good performances from a likable cast that includes Ellen Barkin, Wilford Brimley, Ossie Davis and Morgan Freeman. The one exception to the good performances is Robby Benson who is pretty bad here. Rumor has it that he actually got this part over Tom Cruise, which is a real shame because I think that actor could have done much more. Benson is really lackluster and his rather bizarre performance makes his character more creepy than anything else. Even worse are his incredibly horrid facial gestures, which quite often make the viewer break out in laughter, which certainly wasn't the intent. HARRY & SON was overlooked when it was released and today it's only of interest to Newman fans who want to see the lower side of his career.

A well acted and dramatic film dealing with a construction worker and his family relationship . As Paul Newman is a depressed widower who loses his job and along the way he quarrels with their kids. As Newman is the ordinarily tired old man and we've all seen Robby Benson play the young character too many times .

The script and action are a little thin , and quite pleasantly for a while , until you start realising that Newman has decided to compose this entire movie out of them. Superb interpretations don't make up for a really boring and dull flick . It is nothing more than a constant succession of the sort of emotional peaks players love to do on screen . The result is a curiously tiring phenomenon , and sometimes indigestible and dullness . Nice duo of protagonists : Paul Newman as the widower construction labourer who faces the problems of raising his son Robby Benson, both of whom give awesome acting . Being well accompanied by a notorious plethora of secondaries as a young Ellen Barkin, Wilford Brimley , Judith Ivey , Ossie Davies , Morgan Freeman and of course Joanne Woodward .

It contais an atmospheric cinematography by Donald McAlpine , as well as sensitive and evocative musical score by Henry Mancini . The motion picture was well directed by Paul Newman , though it has a number of flaws and gaps. Being written by Ronald Buck and Paul Newman himself , dedicated to his son who early died due to overdose .The famous actor of hits as "The Hustler , Exodus , Torn Curtain , The Prize , Hud , Harper , Judge Roy Bean, Verdict , Color of Money" , among others , also directed some movies , such as : "The Glass Menagerie , The Effects of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds ,Sometimes a Great Nation , Rachel Rachel and this Harry and Son" . Rating : 6/10 , passable and acceptable . The flick will appeal to Paul Newman fans .

The male response to "Terms of Endearment" fails badly at all levels as it's neither charming with its chaotic humor and neither fully satisfies as a drama. It breaks my heart to see Paul Newman being lead actor/director/writer of a piece so strange, trying to be too many things all at once and not delivering a single right note that makes us care for it. It's one of those cases that you may enjoy the performances (as he got a great ensemble with Ellen Barkin, Wilford Brimley, Judith Ivey, Ossie Davis, Morgan Freeman and Newman's wife Joanne Woodward), enjoy some of the situations but you won't feel relating with anybody and won't learn anything from it, as the mountain of cliches pile up with almost no reward.

The relationship between a sick father (Newman) and his young son (Robby Benson) is given an awkward treatment as they swing back and forth between good buddies to unknown figures to each other who bicker for pointless things, or at times because the idealist promising writer fails to sustain a work. I sort of related with the sensitive kid failing at all the works he applied since he's totally wrong for it, and only writing could help him to come out to life (but his writing sucks, the little it was shown).

Why "Harry and Son" is so weak and never fully works? Newman's character is too stubborn, deeply rooted in his own persona and only thinks about himself; and even when he gets a new chance at love, with the advances from a friend of his deceased wife, he becomes a rude figure. With his son, it gets wildly confusing as to what he really wants from the boy, reaching a point where he kicks him out of home just because his room was a mess, and if one looks back at their very first scene, having a dinner by candlelight and having a nice talk, they never were the kind of men who were against each others throat. As the father's disease is never mentioned (neither treated) I assume he has a brain tumor that makes him such an erratic man, who barely generates any sympathy from the audience.

But what irritated me the most was the bizarre balance of comedy and drama, as none of them are convincing or interesting. Take the famous dish breaking scene where the guys invite the sister/daughter and her husband to lunch and Newman presents his daughter with some fancy dishes from the family and makes a whole "prank" that the estimated dishes break, much to the woman's horror, and ours as well. It goes from slightly funny, to heavily dramatic as she leaves the house, moves back to funny as Newman falls on the same prank while cleaning everything, a chase ensues around the house and then moves to more drama as he feels sick. It's the kind of thing it'd work in literature, here it just try so hard in getting a rollercoaster of emotions that you don't know for whom to care or reject. The whole film goes in between too much drama, too much comedy and it hardly gets right at any of those.

For a higher analysis, "Harry and Son" proves that some people will never grow or they'll never have the ability to change; others will have changes forced upon themselves way before their times and all the learning must be done quickly. But I've seen better with such proof. As a personal project for Mr. Newman, this lacked coherence, passion and heart. Like his character, a demolition crane operator, he crashes everything down in what could be a good film. 5/10.

"Harry and Son" must have meant a lot to Paul Newman because he not only played Harry, but co-wrote the story and screenplay, as well as co-produced and directed the film. His wife, Joanne Woodward, also got dragged into this mess in a small supporting role.

Before Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty, and Newman's buddy Robert Redford stepped behind the camera and won Oscars for directing, Newman won a lot of praise and some awards for his 1968 directorial debut, "Rachel, Rachel," for which Woodward received an Oscar nomination. The film was also nominated for best picture, but Newman was passed over by the director's branch who nominated Stanley Kubrick for "2001: A Space Odyssey" instead (although it might be more accurate to say the Academy gave the best picture nomination that "2001" deserved to the Newman-Woodward film). Whatever promise Newman showed behind the camera wasn't fulfilled, however, and Newman directed only a handful of other films, the best of which, in my opinion, was 1971's "Sometimes a Great Notion" from Ken Kesey's novel about a logging family in Oregon that featured a remarkable scene involving a drowning.

"Harry and Son" suggests that, as a director, Newman was spent. His first mistake was in casting himself as a construction worker, an ornery guy who would have been more suitable for George C. Scott, but made his biggest misstep by casting Robby Benson as his son. Robby Benson!? There was a time in the '70s before the Brat Pack era of the next decade when the soft-voiced, overly pretty, and annoyingly coy Benson seemed to get all the major male roles between the ages of 16 and 25. Fortunately, until the Brat Pack era of which he was not a part, there weren't too many major roles in movies for males aged 16 to 25. Movie audiences, even the 18-25 year olds said to represent the demographic Hollywood covets most, preferred stories with adult characters played by middle-aged actors, whether it was Sean Connery (or Roger Moore) as James Bond, Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, or any of the roles played by Newman, Steve McQueen, Jack Nicholson, Burt Reynolds, and the other box-office draws of that era.

Benson was awful in just about everything he did, and always too goody-goody and sensitive to be believed. He's not convincing as Newman's son, nor does he believably portray a writer which the construction worker's son aspires to be. He sits grimacing at his typewriter, aggressively pounding the keys, and when his father asks why the stories he writes are always being rejected, he calmly says, "It's part of the ritual." That sounds like a remark that a neophyte writer would write for a character who is a writer. It's not what a writer would likely utter while watching the rejection slips piling up, suffering a crisis of confidence on one hand, and feeling defensively superior on the other.

Newman isn't much better. I guess he couldn't help it if he looks too handsome and physically fit for a 58-year-old laborer, but that's because he wasn't a laborer. He was a 58-year-old movie star who kept himself in tip-top shape and resembles a male model more than a construction worker even in his snug jeans and flannel shirt. Newman would convincingly play a blue collar guy a decade later in the excellent "Nobody's Fool," but he didn't write the script for that and left the directing to Robert Benton. As for Benson, he went on to voice the beast in Disney's animated "Beauty and the Beast," and has mercifully remained behind-the-camera ever since. Sorry, Robby, but as an actor, you stank.

Brian W. Fairbanks